


Laplace's Demon

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: AU, F/M, Fluff, Future AU, You just have to trust me that this is fluff, angst quickly resolved, don't freak out after the first couple of hundred words and bail, there's a kind of sci fi vibe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24679273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: This deals with concepts of free will, determinism, cause and effect but there's also some kissing. And a little bit of a wedding. I honestly don't want to say too much because it would be a spoiler.  Get through the first few hundred words and it'll be fine.  Just trust me. No, I know it looks hopeless but when have I ever lied to you?
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 40
Kudos: 74
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Laplace's Demon

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to "We Shall All Be Healed" by The Mountain Goats while writing this. Check it out, it's great...but everything by TMG is great so there's that. Philosophy is my day job and it bled in here a little. I'm weirded out by cause and effect...like you think that when you stand in front of the mirror and raise your arm that that's what causes the reflection to raise its hand but both those things happen at the same time....so maybe it raising its hand is why you raise yours...ughhhh.

“Maximise and balance settings for artistic merit and economic security.”

Jughead’s gnarled, liver-spotted fingers trembled and fumbled ineffectually with the envelope flap. It was partly the constant shaking that accompanied his every movement these days and partly that the girl who sat before him, smiling tolerantly, looked so very much like Her. “Would you like me to help sir?” she asked patiently. 

“Would you…would you read it to me?” he asked, his voice quavering. He sounded like an old fool. He was an old fool. He had turned eighty six in October and, although he never expected to last out the winter these days, it was now a fine April day and here he still was, useless, querulous, tremulous, bad tempered, but still here.

“Of course. My pleasure.” She was very sweet natured. More like her grandmother than her great aunt, at least before Polly had taken a turn when her beau died. So long ago. Betty had always been a little sharper, a little less patient than her sister. He doubted that this pretty little creature had ever even met her grandmother. “So Aunt Betty wrote this last October, October 2nd to be exact. She’s dated it here at the top.” His birthday. Had she remembered that it was his birthday? Probably. She rarely forgot anything in his experience. “Oh I’m so sorry. You’d heard that she passed?”

He nodded, not trusting himself to reply without the tears, that seemed to fall so often now, embarrassing the girl. What had she said her name was? Allegra. That was it. His nephew had come by in December and asked if he remembered a woman called Elizabeth Cooper and he had said that of course he did. He wasn’t senile yet. And VJ had told him that he’d just had a message from his mother that she had died a few days ago. Jellybean had thought that he would want to know, would want family to be with him when he found out. She was kind, Jellybean. Thoughtful. He found out that Betty had had one of the cancers that they didn’t have stem cell treatments for, she’d chosen not to have the transplant, said it wasn’t worth the pain and the trouble. He wished it had been him. He wished that he could have taken her pain, all her pain, always. He didn’t want to live in a world that didn’t have Elizabeth Cooper in it even though he hadn’t seen her in more than half a century. He’d started to cry and VJ had looked shocked. He had no idea how to comfort this blubbering old man, no idea how to be respectful and he was always very respectful. His father had been from India. Now that was a culture that knew how to be compassionate to old people who were past any use. Every day since, he’d thought about death and wished it would hurry along. He wasn’t depressed, he’d just had enough, more than enough.

Every day he sat in this room, looking out over immaculate fake lawns that he supposed he paid someone to sweep. A woman called Ana cooked his meals most days even though he barely ate anymore. Sometimes someone would come and switch on a picture of a fire, sometimes they would open the windows. They’d say something cheerful and patronising. It felt like years since he’d had a worthwhile conversation. Whether it was hologram embers or open windows made no difference to him. The house seemed to function without his intervention. He wondered if it would just carry on when his casket was finally carried out the front door. Today was a little different. Ana had apologised for the interruption after breakfast as if she imagined that he was engaged in some activity when in fact he was simply sitting, like always. “A young lady has come to call on you. She says to tell you that she’s Junie Cooper’s daughter and that you knew her great aunt a long time ago. Would you like to see her or should I tell her that you don’t want visitors?” 

“Tell her to come in,” he said peremptorily and then, remembering that this person had never been anything but patient with him, “if you would be so kind. Thank you Ana.” And she had come in, looking like Betty, bringing him the letter that he was too timid to open.

The girl began to read. If he took off his glasses he could imagine that it was her speaking to him all the way from the past. “‘My dearest Juggie, If you’re reading this I’ve already gone. I don’t expect to be able to celebrate Christmas with the family this year. I’m not sorry about it and I hope that you aren’t sad. I will ask one of the children to bring you this letter in the spring if you are still in the land of the living. No-one wants to think about the dead too much in the winter time. If my letter makes you sad you can look at the blossom, at the flowers. Nothing really stays dead does it? I say one of the children but not one of them is under thirty. Do you remember when thirty seemed so old to us? Now it seems like they are still babies. Much too young to have to make choices that shape the rest of their lives, theirs and other people’s. Too young to do anything but follow their hearts.’” The girl smiled. “Sorry, it’s just that Aunt Betty was always telling us to follow our hearts and take chances while we were young. It’s like she’s here with us. I’ll carry on. ‘Jug, you were the love of my life and yet I never even kissed you but once. I’ll always be sorry that that night, before my wedding day, when you came up the ladder and in through my bedroom window, I lacked the courage to walk down the stairs and tell everyone that the wedding was off and that I was going to run away with Jughead Jones. Of course that was what I wanted to do with all my heart but I was afraid and I didn’t want to make a mistake. I couldn’t face the pain that it would cause Adam. So I hurt us instead. And I hurt Adam too. He knew that I was never able to give myself to him completely. That was why we didn’t have children. After the first year of our marriage, when it became clear that we weren’t really compatible, we slept in separate beds. We were roommates for almost forty years until he passed. I loved him as I loved my dear friends. I trusted and respected him but it has only ever been you that I desired and wanted, dreamed of and cried over.’”

Jug was weeping silently now. The tears ran into his mouth, salty and bitter. He’d tried. When he’d heard that she was going to be married, at first he had pretended to be happy for her, sent his best wishes, sent a bunch of flowers. They should have been yellow roses for jealousy but he sent freesias and tulips instead. He had smiled and made small talk at the engagement party, his stomach churning with bile all the time, threatening to rise in his throat until he vomited. The night before the wedding Archie had looked at him seriously. “You have to tell her Jug. You have to give it a shot. This is the last possible moment. You can’t keep chickening out. You’ll never forgive yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean," he replied.

“Christ Jug, you’ve loved her for years. Since what? Third grade?”

“First. I loved her in first grade. Jesus, Archie, it’s too fucking late. She loves Adam now. I missed my chance.”

“You have to tell her and just let the chips fall. You can’t go to their house and have dinner parties with them for fuck’s sake. You’ll go crazy.” 

And so, the night before the wedding he’d gone to the house on Elm Street, put the ladder up to her window like he’d done when they were in high school. Each time he’d climbed it he’d told himself that this time he was going to kiss her but he never had. Only this time, the night before she married another man, he did kiss her and she kissed him back. He thought, his lips against hers, as she sighed into his mouth and moaned a little in her passion, that she would come down the ladder with him and they could run away but when they pulled apart she was already shaking her head. “It’s too late Jug. I loved you all through school, all through college, waiting for you, longing for you. It’s just too fucking late now. I’ve promised Adam.”

He had tried to argue. He’d wept. He’d told her how sorry he was for not acting sooner. He explained that her friendship was the thing that he held dearest in the world and that he’d been scared all those other times, scared that if he kissed her, declared himself, that he might lose that friendship. There was simply too much at stake. Nothing he could say made any difference. She was stubborn and honourable and she wouldn’t break her word. She’d made him promise not to come to the wedding, promise to keep away because otherwise it would hurt more than she could bear. He had felt rejected, wounded, guilty. He was prone to overdramatic gestures and so he left town, sent a treatment of his book to a movie producer, had it optioned and went west to Hollywood for thirty years. Archie and Veronica said that no-one could sulk like Jughead and they were right about that. 

By most standards it had been a good life. He had made more money that he could spend, he’d taken care of his father, helped JB and Arvind when they needed cash for VJ’s gene therapy. He’d created some good work, won some acclaim. He’d worn a tux and collected an Oscar once, a movie star on his arm on the red carpet. He was proud of most of his screenplays. He’d had relationships with women that were fun and interesting, none of them ended acrimoniously although all of them ended. He had helped two of his lesbian friends to have a son and he treasured the pictures of the boy that they sent him. When he moved back east he bought this beautiful house and wrote three novels, each of which was lucrative and critically well received. If you had asked him what he wanted from his life when he was a kid he would have said that he wanted to be a writer and he wanted not to be cold or hungry. He got what he wanted. And now, with complete certainty, he knew that it meant abso-fucking-lutely nothing. 

He realised that the young woman was waiting, compassion shining in her eyes. “Do you want me to carry on or should we leave it for now?”

“Please…carry on. I’m sorry. It’s just, when you get old, everything seems closer to the surface. It’s harder to hide it.”

She smiled sympathetically but she was much too young to understand. “So she goes on, ‘I have had a good life in so many ways. I was free to have the career that I wanted, free to choose my own path. I helped raise Junie and Woody, saw them have kids of their own. I can’t complain. But I want you to understand that if I could go back, I would go with you, without question, without regret, without guarantees. You were what my life should have been about and I am forever sorry that I didn’t realise that until it was much too late. I long for the children that I would have had with you, for the books that you would have written with me, for the adventures we would have gone on together. I have never told you that I love you in person but hear me now, Jughead Jones. You were loved, passionately and completely, for three quarters of a century by Elizabeth Cooper. If there is something beyond I will meet you there.  
With my devotion  
Betty.’  
“Wow,” she murmured, “That’s quite the letter. Are you OK sir? Should I call someone? Mr Jones? Sir?”

He closed his eyes, exhaled and then simply stopped breathing.

A line of white light appeared, bisecting the girl’s face. It ran up, above her head and down, through her sweater, though the chair, across the rug. It widened and widened. It was a door, opening from another dimension, cutting through the fabric of reality. White light streamed in from whatever lay beyond. Jug stared, sitting upright, his ancient corpse still laying back in the recliner. “Is this heaven?” he asked, unsure what he was using for lips, breath, a brain.

A white coated woman laughed as she approached. “No honey. Oh you creative types always invest a little more. You’re at futuReView. We just ran your future simulation. Take a moment. Sometimes it helps to think about recent events, think about what you had for breakfast, or something physical, kissing your girl or something…umm…similar.”

Gradually it began to come back to him. He’d been in homeroom, working on a Blue and Gold article with Betty when Principal Weatherbee had knocked and entered with a woman in a business suit. He’d introduced her as Ms Barratt and told them that she had an interesting opportunity to discuss with them. Jug was suspicious. Corporate types made his spidey sense tingle and Barratt was the corporate-est of them all in her grey business suit and her self assurance. She explained that her company was in VR, they had developed the Panopticon game that everyone had been obsessed with last summer. Now they were looking at other applications for the tech. Then she started on a philosophy lecture which was unexpected. She asked if they believed in causal necessity and almost everone looked pretty blank until Betty had said “Just that everything that happens has a cause?” and Barratt had nodded.

“Yes, that, but also that given the cause only one effect is possible. So if you throw the baseball at the window with force X on trajectory Y it will break every single time. You’d have to change some variable to get a different effect. Yes?” Reggie and Archie had switched off at this point but Jug was intrigued. What was a games company doing fucking around with cause and effect? 

“So?” he said, a typically gnomic remark that made Betts grin at him.

“Ever heard of Laplace?” she asked, so clearly expecting a response in the negative given the state of public education in the United States that he couldn’t resist.

“The town in Louisiana or the French eighteenth century polymath?” Jug shot back and Betts giggled. Fuck, he loved it when she giggled like that. And when she didn’t… and when she just existed in the world. Barrett looked at him with an iota more respect when she replied.

“The latter. So his idea was that if we could completely map all the forces at play, gravity to game theory, along with the exact current state of affairs in the world that we could predict the future. If we had the information, the data, we could work out the trajectory of everything including ourselves. Just as, if you know the trajectory and velocity of the baseball, you can work out if the window is going to break. Well now we have that data, we have the computing power and as Laplace put it “for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” What’s more we have the VR capacity to put you into that future, let you play there, let you try out life options, try out careers, colleges, hobbies, marriage partners. Like a dry run of your life. Try it on, see if you like it. I’m here today to offer you a wonderful opportunity.”  
Jug’s spidey sense went into overdrive. Corporate types offering working class folks like him “opportunities” tended to go badly. For the working class folks at least. A wonderful opportunity to mine asbestos and have your lungs turn to glass, or travel the world in the armed forces and get your head blown off in some fucking foreign oil field or the opportunity to borrow so much money to buy a house that you’d never have a day of freedom for the rest of your life. “We’re in beta testing now and we want volunteers to try out this exciting experience and we’d like to follow up with you over the next three to five years. In exchange we are prepared to offer you a substantial payment towards college expenses.” He could see through the scam, obviously. By paying towards college they were ensuring that the subjects had a much better chance of positive life outcomes, they could then demonstrate that their product was of benefit to those who participated. But if it was his positive life outcome he felt obliged to grab it. Paying for college was something that he’d been worried about for months, this could be his big break. All it required was a little courage and he had some of that to spare.

“What are the side effects?” he asked. “Has it made anyone go crazy? Shoot people in a McDonalds? Throw themselves off a bridge? Quack like a duck and have to be put away?”

“We’re screening volunteers very carefully to ensure they are psychologically robust. We need people who are not users of narcotics because that skews the experience. You’d need to take a sedative in order to let go of your resistance to the VR and immerse fully in the experience and it can make re-entry a little disorientating.” It was business speak for this being very dangerous for the mentally ill. Betts was looking at him with a concerned expression but he was already sold.

He grabbed a flyer and a questionnaire from Barratt as they headed off for AP History and then had to listen to Betty try to persuade him not to have anything to do with it. “Juggie, you can’t let them mess with your head. What if it gives you brain damage or something?”

“Well if that happens I’ll go to Riverdale Community College with Reggie, take up sports and get a job on the faculty here.” He grinned at her in a way he knew made it hard for her to be mad with him and, for good measure, shook his head so his hair fell into his eyes. He saw her hand twitch as she tried not to stroke it back. “One day Cooper,” he thought, “one day you’ll weaken.”

They talked about it all day between classes and over lunch. “What have we got Cooper?” he’d asked as he slid in next to her on the bench. 

“Well I made you beef and cheddar but I’ve got tuna salad if you want to swap.”

“Not even in jest Betts. Beef me.” He held out a hand and she passed the sandwich over, grinning as he tried to shove the whole thing into his mouth.

“So are you still planning to let Big Data scramble your noggin for cash?”

“Yep. It’s a no brainer Betts.”

“You’ll be a no brainer. I like your head Juggie. I’m so worried about this. And I’ve been thinking, I don’t see how it can work anyway. There’s quantum indeterminacy for one thing. Everything’s just probabilities really, causation isn’t as simple as she was trying to make it seem.”

“Look Betts there’s a chance that the beta testing is dangerous. But it’s not a certainty that it’ll do me any harm or even close to a certainty because they aren’t going to risk the bad publicity of turning all of their volunteers into zombies. Right?”

“Well, I guess so.”

“OK, so without this I can’t see how I’m going to pay for college. I’ll be stuck here when the rest of you go. What do you think’s going to happen to me? Hint, look at my dad. College is the best chance I have of a decent, worthwhile life. This is the best chance I have of college. So, like you say, it’s all probabilities. People like me have to play the probabilities. Like, here’s a for instance. Say we all went to Vegas. Imagine Veronica playing blackjack. What would she do?”

“Something dramatic. She’d bet everything on one hand and twist when she should stick and then just laugh when she got twenty four or something and order another champagne cocktail.”

“Exactly. Because it doesn’t matter if she wins or loses. She’ll be fine either way. What would I do?”

“Order a coke and sit in a corner making sarcastic remarks.”

“Ouch. True though. What if I had to pay off a bad debt to a mob boss by six a.m. and I only have fifty bucks in the world?”

“Where the hell do you get these scenarios? You’d bet cautiously, try to avoid unnecessary risks and the second you’d got to the amount you needed you’d quit.”

“Precisely. Play the probabilities, gamble as small as you can afford to. That’s what I’m doing Betts.”

He could remember now, riding the bike to the industrial unit in Centreville and giving his name at the gate. He remembered the steel surfaces and rubber floors of the reception room where he’d been handed a thick stack of paperwork. He’d filled in forms and signed disclaimers until his hand ached and, most importantly he’d given them his newly acquired bank details so they could set up a trust fund to pay twenty thousand fucking dollars to the institute of higher learning of his choice. He’d felt nervous but also he’d been curious, excited. Eventually an operative had come to fetch him and asked if he had questions as they walked down long white corridors that smelled of ozone and floor polish. Jug had told him that he was sceptical. “There’s no way that you can map everything with enough detail for this to work. It’s the whole “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” thing. And all that quantum weirdness too.” 

“It’s probabilities. We might not know exactly where the butterfly is but we know there’s likely to be one so we develop algorithms that account for the probability of the butterfly. If you’re using macro data you can just work in the fact that there are going to be butterflies…and there are going to be tornadoes. We’re running simulations all the time, for the drugs companies, law enforcement, political parties and they’re way more accurate than you’d imagine. The space launch that got pulled last week? That was us.”

“But what about free will? Are you saying that’s a myth?”

They’d reached a set of double doors with stainless steel kick strips along the bottom and Jug’s guide pushed them open to reveal a VR space that looked like the amphitheatres where live streamed games tournaments were held. The tech was still talking. “Well, it depends what you mean by free will. Like, you’d probably say you chose to come here today but I guess you wouldn’t be here unless your economic situation made the cash appealing. And your brain chemistry has determined that you can tolerate some risk…and you didn’t choose either of those factors. So your DNA, your socio-economic background, led you to do this. And you then doing it is as free as you get. But we’ll ask you what your default choices should be. Some people say that what matters to them is having kids or being healthy or being rich or getting lots of action, whatever you place the most value on. We take that into account. Now let’s get you wired in.”

The set up took twenty minutes and then another white coat arrived with a syringe on a tray. Jug felt nervous about the needle but once it had plunged through the skin at the inside of his elbow he started to drift a little woozily. “OK, we’re done. So before you jump in what are we prioritising?”

“I want to be a writer. So art, creativity,” Jug said, the relaxant making him unashamed of his ambition.

“OK, nice. Something different. OK, we’ll be starting in just a minute.”

“Wait.” Jug was remembering those bone chilling, gut twisting nights as he tried to sleep through cold and hunger in the projection booth at the drive in. “Um, like I said art but can I not be poor? Like not Van Gogh art. I don’t want to write things that people think are crappy until after I’m dead. I don’t want to starve.” 

“Right. Maximise for commercially valuable art. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Jug.

“Is there a particular time period you’re interested in? Do you just want an ordinary day or your wedding day or something particular?”

“I want my last day. I want to see my death.”

“Really? Well that’s a new one. Most people don’t want to die once and you’re going for having it twice?”

“Yeah, life in review. I want to see the whole thing. And I guess I want to know if I should bother eating vegetables or if that shit is academic because I get wiped out by a truck when I’m twenty two.”

“Fine. Your funeral. Or closest thing to it. Going in now.”

Now, still feeling a little unsteady as he was unhooked from the machinery he was aware that the woman in the white coat was speaking to him again. “We maximised your settings as per your instructions but I can see from your trace that it wasn’t quite what you hoped for was it? We can go again if you want to try something different but we have to start charging for the rig time. It’s five thousand dollars for each run. We can deduct it from your fee. You want that we should just dive back in?”

“No. No thanks. I know what was wrong. No need. Thanks. Can you unhook me please? I have to be somewhere.”

He rode the bike to Elm Street as fast as he could given that the sedative was still making him wobbly. That jello feeling in his knees almost led him to chicken out and knock at the front door but it just wasn’t the scenario he had in his imagination. He parked the bike in Fred’s driveway, wandered around the house, found the old ladder by the garage and propped it against Betty’s window. Her light was on, curtains drawn. She might be naked. She might be in just her underwear. Her hair might be loose. He shook himself like Vegas when he and Archie bathed him, shaking off the lust, and set a boot on the bottom rung. He climbed like a mechanical thing, step after step, rung after rung, trying to stop his mind whirring. He needed to not overthink this. Finally he could put a hand on the windowsill and he rapped against the glass. There was a sweet little huff of surprise and then she was drawing aside the curtain and pulling up the window sash. Pyjamas. Her T shirt top rode up as she raised her arms. He could see a sliver of skin across her belly. If all his blood continued to rush south like this he would probably fall off the ladder. Didn’t predict that did they? Death by catastrophic hard on. His shaking trick wouldn’t work at the top of the ladder so he sucked in a deep, shuddering breath instead and scrambled inelegantly through the window. 

“Hey Juggie. Did you do it?” She was looking him over, trying to check if he was the same. He wasn’t. Now he was a young man who knew what he wanted. And what he wanted was standing in front of him in PJs with tiny ice cream cones printed on them.

“Yeah, just done with it an hour ago. Look I need to tell you something.” She was standing in the middle of her room, staring at him, sensing that this was important.

“What, about futuReView? What happened?”

“Ahh, I don’t want to tell you, I mean not yet. I think it’d screw with your free will or at least your illusion of free will, or something…I dunno, it feels unethical anyway. But that’s not it. All that stuff I was saying about probabilities, about not betting big unless you have to?”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“It’s crap. Ignore it. Sometimes you’ve got to bet huge , risk everything on the turn of a card. Because if you don’t you spend the rest of your life wondering, regretting that you were such a pussy. Feeling sorry for yourself…Also…”

“What?” And now the moment was here he almost lost his nerve. To risk her, to not sit with her at lunch, to never have her bring him a sandwich, not to have her friendship was too much to bear and yet he had to risk it all. “What?” she asked again, a hint of laughter in her voice. He looked into her eyes for a clue and she glanced at his mouth. It was a sign. Maybe. He took a deep breath and lurched towards her to press his lips against hers. He felt her smile against his mouth. He’d been concerned that he didn’t really know what he was supposed to do if he ever managed to get his mouth on hers but now it was happening there was some sort of species memory kicking in. He held his hand against her jaw and moved his lips to a new angle and she sighed and he thought that maybe this was heaven after all.

When he pulled back she was looking at him with such a soft expression that he almost wept. “I thought maybe that would never happen Juggie. I was beginning to lose hope.”

“You should have said something. I was so scared that I’d lose you as a friend Betts, that was all that was stopping me. I’ve wanted this ever since I knew what this was.”

“Me too.” She stepped forward and put her head against his chest and he wrapped his arms around her and kissed the top of her head, breathing her in.  
“Just one thing Betts. Will you make me a promise?”

“Tell me what it is first.”

“Will you promise that whatever happens with us that you’ll never date a guy called Adam, like not ever?”

“Sure, I guess. If it’s important.”

“So important. Can I kiss you again?”

Eight years later she shook his jacket from her shoulders and launched herself from the threshold onto the bed while he was still pulling the key card from the lock, ivory satin billowing around her like a parachute. Laying on her back she waggled her feet, trying and failing to shake off the ballet slippers she’d swapped for her uncomfortable wedding shoes when the dancing began. He moved to stand at the end of the bed and ease them off, lifting her feet as he did so to kiss her toes. “Oh gross, don’t Juggie. I’ve been dancing, my feet are all…oh, oh wow.”

To tease her he’d sucked a toe between his lips and, unexpectedly she moaned, deep in her chest. “Yeah?” He gazed into her eyes looking for confirmation. 

“Oh yeah. Wow, that’s a new one. Oh Juggie, it’s so…Get up here. But that’s definitely something for another time. Hey are you going to tell me now? You said you’d tell me when it wouldn’t “impinge upon my autonomy”’ She made scare quote gestures and put on a pompous voice to mock him and he threw himself onto the bed next to her and tickled her ribs in revenge. She gasped and giggled helplessly.

“Stop, oh stop, I have to pee. Don’t make me wet myself on my wedding night.” She jumped up and ran into the bathroom while he scooted up the bed to rest against the pillows, trying to decide whether he should tell her or not. He guessed that he wasn’t really allowed any secrets now so when she came back he told her about the day of his death. He rummaged through his wallet until he found a slip of paper and read to her what he recalled of her letter. He’d written it down when he got back to the trailer after he’d kissed her for the first time. She cried as he read it which hadn’t been quite the wedding night vibe he’d hoped for.

“But why didn’t you take that second run? Didn’t you want to see how it would work out for us?” She asked through her tears.

“You’d said it in the letter. ‘Without question, without regret, without guarantees.’ Whatever we have to face I can face it with you. I trust you with our lives Betts. Just like you trust me. And I’d chosen what mattered most in my life. You. No point sweating the small stuff. I’m just glad I got the chance to avoid screwing up my life before the whole op got taken over by the CIA. They’re totally going to be manipulating time lines you know. There’s definitely a story there.”

“Yeah but not one for our wedding night. But you were like a big Hollywood success story? Oh my god Trula Twyst! Whenever we see one of her movies you get all soft and nostalgic! Did you… Jug did you give up Trula Twyst for me?”

“I didn’t give up anything Betts. I gambled the most precious thing I had, your friendship, and I broke the bank I won so big. I got this. There is absolutely nothing in the world that compares to this…” He groaned, deep in his chest. “Or especially that. Oh fuck.” She was stroking her hand over the front of his dress pants and he was losing himself in the sensation. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him mischievously. He pushed her hand back onto himself and murmured “I did have an Oscar though, so if you’d like to make that up to me I wouldn’t be mad…” and she licked her lips as she pulled down his zipper.


End file.
